Birds · plate 33 of 60
Flamingo
Phoenicopterus roseus
Eats upside down, stands on one leg, travels in thousands.
Only 1.7% of people are Flamingos. (estimated)
If you're a Flamingo
You are never alone and you have never wanted to be. Greater flamingos live in colonies of thousands, court in synchronized group marches, and feed with their heads upside down in lakes too salty for most other life; you thrive in a crowd, keep up appearances and stand your ground on one leg if necessary. The color is diet. The posture is choice.
A flamingo is born gray and turns pink from pigments in the algae and shrimp it eats; on the wrong diet it fades back toward white.
The Flamingo as a spirit animal
Matching a Flamingo says you are sociable to the bone, devoted to your crowd and oddly resilient in environments that would finish most people off. You like a routine, a reflection and a group that moves in step. The flaw is that you take on the color of whatever you consume; mind the diet, in every sense. Flamingos look serene because the hard work is happening underwater, upside down. So is yours.
Grounded in how the species actually lives; nothing borrowed from anyone's tradition. Why we put it that way.
How to get along with a Flamingo
Do
- Include them in everything; a Flamingo alone is a Flamingo in distress.
- Keep the routine; they court, feed and nest on a schedule.
- Mind what you feed them, in food and in gossip; both show.
Don't
- Don't split them from the group for long.
- Don't knock the one-leg thing. It is more efficient than yours.
When it goes wrong: A Flamingo under pressure honks, flaps and sets the whole colony off; take the heat out of the group first, then talk to them quietly once the others have settled.
The Flamingo in a relationship
You love in a crowd and in step. Flamingos pick a partner during a group display, share nest-building and chick-feeding equally, and frequently pick a new partner the following year; you are fully committed to whoever is beside you and relaxed about forever. The group outlasts any pairing. You know this.
Field notes
Every animal is placed on six personality traits derived from how the species lives. Your answers are placed on the same six, and the closest animal wins. How the scoring works
- Sociability
- 10
- Boldness
- 3
- Energy
- 3
- Curiosity
- 2
- Devotion
- 7
- Roaming
- 6
- A flamingo can stand on one leg with almost no muscle effort; even a dead one stays up if positioned right.
- Flamingos feed with the head upside down, pumping water through comb-like plates in the beak to trap tiny food.
- Both flamingo parents make a reddish crop milk for their single chick, a trick shared with pigeons and emperor penguins.
Flamingos in literature
- The Flamingos — Jungle Tales (The Flamingos' Stockings), Horacio Quiroga (1918)
- The Flamingo — Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (the croquet ground), Lewis Carroll (1865)
- The Flamingo — The Birds, Aristophanes (414 BCE)
Characters from public-domain works. Company, not a verdict.
Closest personalities
The animals whose profiles sit nearest to the Flamingo's. If you got Flamingo, one of these was probably your runner-up.
Other birds
EagleOwlRavenHummingbirdPeacockPenguinAlbatrossParrotSwanWoodpeckerFalconOstrichPigeon
Among the 60
Brehms Tierleben, Alfred Brehm (1892). Public domain, viacommons.wikimedia.org.All credits
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